How we ranked the best suburbs in America

We started out by looking at 2,754 municipalities across the
country with populations between 5,000 and 100,000 that are
located within a metropolitan
statistical area and had both crime and socioeconomic data
available. There's no official definition of a "suburb," so we
decided that small to mid-size towns and cities located near and
economically integrated with a major city was a good starting
point.

To get an initial ranking, we rescaled each of those variables to
a common
normalized scale and added the resulting scores together. For
the top 200 of towns on that intermediate ranking, we added
in, where available, bonus points based on ratings
of the towns' schools from GreatSchools.org. After
factoring in those bonus points from school ratings, we came up
with our final ranking.